Trip Part eight – Mesa Verde and the Great Divide

Mesa Verde

Our next visit a few miles along highway 160 was to have a look at a place called Mesa Verde.
For most of my formative years, the Cowboy and Indian Westerns presented a very simplistic view of the peoples of America. Most of these stories featured the clean shaven, white hatted, two gun packing hero who just wanted to live peaceably in the prairies raising cattle, singing songs about four footed friends and life on the range and who always got the girl. Pitted against him and his girl, were the evil badly shaven, black hatted gangsters, often with a long moustache, property developers with a neat moustache, claim jumpers and of course on top of all these enemies, were the hordes of hostile Indians, wearing feathered headdresses and firing deadly, but strangely inaccurate arrows at him. These savages were only driven off by the cavalry arriving in the nick of time and allowing the victims to count the dead and carry on with their peaceful lives.

The typical hero, white hat, two guns and a terrific right hook 

The Indians lived in wigwams, hunted buffalo and were unreasonably aggressive, constantly attacking the peaceful law abiding settlers at the slightest whim, with the occasional good Indian, thrown in who was fanatically loyal to the hero for various, often unspecified reasons.

It was rarely suggested in those days was that these Native American peoples also only wanted to live in peace too, without being driven off their traditional hunting grounds by the encroaching white settlers. The Indians featured in these Westerns were plains Indians and none of these stories ever suggested that there were any other kinds of Native Americans.
For many years, raised on this diet, I had no idea that there were also many other Native Americans living in a totally different manner to the plains Indians, living in settlements, built permanent dwellings and grew their own food. Also no one ever mentioned that American cultures go back thousands of years into prehistory and many different peoples have lived in different parts of the ‘New World’, long before it was discovered by Europeans.
There are many archaeological sites and ruins scattered across the USA ranging in age from 10,000 BC to just a few hundred years ago. A mummified corpse found in a cave in Nevada has been dated as 7,420 B.C, placed there by an established society of the time. All across the Colorado plateau around the Four Corners there are remains of Anasazi settlements that pre date the current Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo Indians living there now. Their exact relationship to the Anasazi is unclear since some translations of the name mean Ancient Foes, some translate as The Ancient Ancestors or The people who came before.

Mesa Verde is the site of an ancient Pueblo settlement where these particular people had lived until about 1200AD. They were cliff dwellers and built substantial brick dwellings in crevices and under overhangs in cliff faces. They were also an agricultural people who grew maize, squash and made a characteristic pottery which is still produced. They must have been extremely agile because access to some of their dwellings was only by scaling ladders and using toe holds carved into the rock.
It is from these people that we obtained Maize because they cultivated it for many centuries and developed the seed into a number of varieties which are still around today.

Much of the USA suffered an extensive drought around 1200AD and so it is believed this was the cause of them abandoning their homes at this site.

Point Lookout comes into view as you climb up to the mesa proper
Click to enlarge any  picture

It is a long drive, about 15 miles, up to the top of the Mesa, which is a little under 7,000 feet high. It is not so long ago that the road was put in so anyone living there had a very long trek to get to and from the summit and the surrounding countryside.

Approaching the top

One of the canyons running into the top of the mesa

These do not look deep, but that is a forest at the bottom

Once there, you can walk along the canyon to view the cliff dwellings. Some of these are little more than a walled in cleft in the rock, but some like the House of many Windows, is a complex many roomed dwelling.

At first you just see a cliff face but look carefully
there are buildings all along the front of the cliff

Looking a bit closer and you can see the structures

Again look carefully and you will see the buildings

A closer view again reveals the buildings hidden in the cave

 Going through the visitors centre you can view the most complex series of structures on the site and climb down into the Cliff Palace which is found hidden in the narrow canyon.

Abandoned around 1200AD, these ruins are in amazing condition

Inside the square three story building the wall decorations are still  in remarkable condition

These circular Pit Houses were roofed over and had a central fire place with a smoke hole in the roof. 

The top of the mesa has very little rain and can become extremely dry, which often leads to fires. There is not a lot that can be done to control these, so they will burn until either it does rain or they run out of fuel. Signs of past fires abound in the area, some recent some quite old.

Signs of a fairly recent fire

Plant life returns

After looking around for about an hour, we returned through the inevitable Gift shop where I was able to buy myself a replacement hat for the one I left in the Grand Canyon.

You could take a guided tour

This was the last of the most special sights we were able to visit on this trip, and now we were heading home. We had booked a hotel in Colorado Springs and had to cross over the Rocky Mountains once again before arriving there.

The road down from Mesa Verde

 We descended from the mesa into a flat valley which was farmland and re-joined highway 160.

You can see how high you are as you start to head down

Down in the Animas River Valley

 Travelling east along the 160, we passed through a town called Durango and then on to Pagosa Springs where we started to approach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. As we approached them, the houses started to take on a distinctly Alpine look, similar to buildings in Austria and Switzerland.

An Alpine house

The foot hills of the Rocky Mountains

We started to climb and soon we started to see snow around us.

Snow in June at ten thousand feet

 Our route took us through Wolf Creek Pass which is about 10,500 feet but we did not have any trouble with crisp packets this time.
The hills were highly forested and by the time we reached the Continental Divide, there was snow on the ground underneath the trees we were passing.

Snow under the trees

We stopped at the Great Divide sign, for an obligatory photo shoot of the family posed straddling the Continental Divide.

The metal strip under the sign shows the exact line of the Divide

From here on it was downhill until we reached South Fork, which is on the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Considering this river is part of the border between Mexico and the USA, it starts out a long way north of the border. Having run parallel with highway 160 for about fifty miles we crossed the Rio Grande at Alamosa, the river heading south as we continued east.

Crossing the Rio Grande

The area is still fairly mountainous and we went up and down a few times passing some spectacular scenery.

Arriving at Walsenburg, we joined the Interstate I-25, headed north towards Pueblo and finally Colorado Springs.

Heading North

 At Colorado Springs we stayed in the Academy Hotel, close to the US Air Force Academy and air base.

The next morning we set out on highway 24 to join the I-70 for our return to Kansas.

A slight change of subject before the next part of the trip...

Another blog posting I read today showing a scene from Wolverhampton reminded me of this slightly different scenario.
I once stayed in Wolverhampton.
 There was a mix up with my accommodation when sent to Birmingham on business for a week and since there was a show on at the NEC, it was only after a long search by my firm's administration staff that somewhere was found for me. It was in Wolverhampton, nothing was available anywhere closer.  On arriving, I was met by my landlady and shown a room which was temporally vacant for the next three days and after that I would have to move to another room when that became vacant later in the week. The room I went into had been empty for several days and was incredibly cold.  Despite being April it had snowed most of the day. There was no heating and the sheets felt like cold water as you slid into them. I awoke at about one AM shivering violently and chilled in all my extremities. I had to rub my arms and legs to get sensation back into them and stop shivering. I managed to warm up enough to get back to sleep after I had moved around enough to generate a little body heat and I awoke early, before six, fortunately free of hypothermia.  I dressed  and went to the dining room which I knew was heated, prepared to wait there in the warm. I was a little early for breakfast, I thought, but was greeted by my landlady with a cheerful ‘Morningg chick’ In strong Wolverhampton. She was already preparing breakfast and delivered a plate of fried cholesterol surprisingly quickly. I mentioned the fact that the room was cold and she told me that she may be able to sort something out for me for tomorrow night, she would let me know.
When I returned that evening, I was told, ’Oive got you in the spare bed room chick.’ and she showed me upstairs to the attic. This room was in the roof space and was the same size as the whole floor plan of the house and it was full of furniture. The room was not actually a spare bedroom as I had assumed, but a room in which she stored the spare beds. Hence spare bed room.  In one small corner she had made up a bed and Luxury! It had a warm radiator right by the bed.  I had already eaten at the hotel where my more fortunate colleagues were staying, so I sat in the small dining room cum lounge with some of the other inmates to watch TV. This turned out to be a slot meter TV where the guests were expected to feed the thing with 10p coins. It seemed it was  by general consent a sort of round and so each of us took turns to put a coin in the meter at about thirty minute intervals when the dial showed it was getting low. About ten o'clock, one man had just put a 10p piece in when suddenly the door to the kitchen opened a crack, a hand shot round the corner and pulled the mains plug from the TV. ‘That’s enough for tonight. Oive got to get oop uarly and do the breakfusts. Goodnight.’ And the door slammed shut.
A stunned silence followed by some murmuring of discontent as we all sidled off to our respective bed rooms.
I was happy enough to have a nice warm bed room and soon was able to get to sleep. At six I woke up and was about to strip off to wash when the door burst open and in came the landlady, saying, ‘Come on chick, no one oversleeps here. Your breakfast is getting cold!’ and walked out slamming the door. After washing, I went down and sure enough found my breakfast on the dining room table slowly congealing. I was not very hungry that morning for some reason. I was saved the next day by someone having to go home early from the rather more up-market hotel where the rest of my colleagues were staying and I was able to get in there, but I have never forgotten my Wolverhampton landlady and her strange brand of hospitality.

A Trip Part seven – Monument Valley

As promised my replacement hat, which I bought during the next part of this trip,
so it is out of sequence, but a promise is a promise.
Click to enlarge any image

The following Morning we headed back up route 89 towards Monument Valley. We passed by Sunset Crater again and debated if it would be worth a visit. I was not convinced it was a good idea, commenting that because it had last erupted only about 800 years ago, I had no intention of going anywhere near it.  It is billed as an extinct volcano but in my mind something quiet for that short a span, short geologically that is, was not in my opinion extinct, only dormant. My argument convinced certain of the others of our party, or maybe they just humoured me, and so we gave it a miss.

Some tumble-weed we passed on our way, often featured in Hollywood Westerns 

The area we were driving through is a part of the Navajo and Hopi reservation and as you drive along this route you pass numerous roadside stalls selling Native American Jewellery and genuine locally made ornaments and souvenirs.  Some stalls consisted of a simple open counter with an awning and others were housed inside a building that could hold several stalls.

A Navajo house we passed

  We stopped for lunch at Tuba City having turned onto route 160 just before this small town, which is famous for its dinosaur footprints. We did not look for these, but ate our lunch and then headed on along the 160.

The entrance to Goulding's Trading Post, which provides accommodation , a store and  a museum.

Goulding's Trading Post, Lodge and and Museum.  We stopped here for a comfort break

Highway 160 has the unique property of passing through, or very close to, the junction of the four corners of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico’s state boundaries where, because they all have perfectly right angles to their boundaries at this point, the four corners all come together. This is a unique situation and exists only at this one place in the whole of the USA. At the junction, there is a monument that consists of a circle with the state lines passing through it and you can stand in a marked circle and by placing both hands and feet on the ground you can be in four states at once. We did not quite make this landmark because we were heading into Monument Valley which is on the 163, so we left the 160 and joined this road which heads north up across the Utah state line and then curves back around to re-join the 160 after it has entered Colorado just past the Four Corners.

The Four Corners monument

Monument Valley is another WOW! area, all Wily Coyote country with mesas and isolated mountains rising suddenly out of the desert. We did not see any road runners or coyotes either, but what we did see more than made up for this lack of visible wildlife.

Kayenta the start of Monument Valley

Arizona had been suffering some fairly widespread fires in the weeks before we started out on our Grand Tour and we pass by evidence of some of these fires with some hills entirely denuded of trees. For much of the time we had been in Nevada and Arizona, the air was hazed blue from the residual smoke still in the air.

A burnt out hill in Arizona

In this part of the country there was a haze too but it was a different colour and was caused by dust.

A particularly dusty stretch of road

Here and there, there were road signs warning travellers that there could be dust storms.
We saw a few dust devils over in the distance, thin spirals of dust whipped up by the wind like miniature tornadoes. At one point one of these came across the road in front of us. TS slowed down to let it pass but misjudged it slightly and it just brushed us as it went by and it rocked the car alarmingly. I had always thought these things were just a rotating gust of wind and had not realised how strong they could be. I have seen them in the distance before in other parts of the world and they always looked quite harmless but had never gotten this close to one before.

You can only just see the dust devil in this picture as a hazy patch  between the centre two pylons

Seeing a quite promising rest stop, we took a break and had a short wander around one of the small Native American stores. Some years before on a visit to the USA, TBH had bought a pair of Kokopelli earrings and a couple of years or so ago had lost one of them.  Kokopelli is a mythical spirit figure which turns up in many parts of America. He is often depicted with a hump back and playing a flute. He is a trickster but was often worshiped as the spirit of music and fertility.

A typical image of Kokopelli

 He is featured in many kinds of jewellery and appears in most tourist shops in one form or another. He is also the name of many hostelries all over the south west.

One of the many establishments using the Kokopelli name

TBH loved her original earrings and was heartbroken by the loss, so we were interested in seeing if we could find another pair. We did not find anything suitable on that occasion but we bought some different souvenirs and jewellery for family whilst we were there.

Passing into Monument Valley we started to see some of the amazing rock formations that make it a must for a national park.

The climb up to Monument Valley Pass

Coming down from the pass.
This must have been a tricky route before Highway 163 was blasted through this ridge.  

The next place on this route is Mexican Hat, which is down in the San Juan River valley and as we descended we were presented with the most spectacular rock formations, where folding and weathering had created huge wave patterns in the mountain overlooking the San Juan river.

The San Juan River

The spectacular patterns in the rock strata of these ridges

As we drove up the other side of this river valley, we discovered how Mexican Hat had got its name.

The Mexican Hat rock formation

The rippled ridge was still visible some miles after passing Mexican Hat

By the time we got back on highway 160, we had gone from Arizona through Utah and had arrived in Colorado and were now back on Mountain Time, so had to put all our watches forward an hour. We should have done that as soon as we entered Utah but we had not thought of it until we had to check the time of our planned arrival at our next stop. This was to be in Cortez at the Baymont Inn and Resort. We arrived in good time to find an eatery and check in for the night.
Cortez is a popular tourist centre but has nothing much to offer other than its proximity to several famous tourist spots.  It is is the county town for the Montezuma county and boasts a lot of accommodation for a small town of a little over eight thousand inhabitants.
The Baymont Hotel was a probably the nicest hotel of the trip, providing good accommodation and with a balcony outside our room overlooking the nearby mountains.

The view through our hotel bedroom window

One of those weird coincidences that happen when you are on holiday occurred whilst we were staying there, we met a couple who were on a coach trip and who came from a little village adjacent to my old hometown where I lived as a teenager. Not only did they come from the same small corner of England, but the lady had worked in the same offices as my father.

A similar encounter had occurred when we were there on our last visit to the family in 2009. Whilst having coffee in a Borders book shop in Kansas City, a man with an English North Country accent asked us if we were English and we started talking. He told us how he had left England and was now living in the USA and it turned out that when he was last in England, he and I had both worked in the same place for the same organisation, although at different times.

Our next destination was Mesa Verde, an abandoned Pueblo Indian ruin and after breakfast we set off for this fascinating archaeological site.

A trip part six

The Grand Canyon

After the memorable and amusing checkout from the Luxor, we headed from Las Vegas towards Boulder, where we intended to visit the Hoover Dam. This is quite close to Vegas and so we were able to get there quite soon. At one time the main road went over the dam but due to its age and the accumulated vibration of heavy trucks passing over it, it was decided to build a bypass, so the main road crosses the Colorado River on high bridge below the dam and you now have to divert off route 93 if you want to visit the dam itself.

It took four years to build

Looking up  Lake Mead.  Low water levels due to lack of rain

 The old road still passes over the dam but it is blocked from re-joining route 93 on the far side, so you have to turn around and come back across the dam again if you cross it. Once over the far side, you enter Arizona and at certain times of the year the time zones are an hour different each side of the dam, because unlike Nevada, Arizona does not have daylight saving.

From the Arizona side of the dam, you can see the road crossing along the top of the dam

There are car parking spaces on either side of the river and you can then walk down to the dam itself. Whilst it had been hot in Vegas it had been dry heat, here on the dam the temperature was at 110F (43C) but humid so we did not stay very long. We also chose the multi-storey car park, which was one of the furthest away from the dam because there, the car was parked in the shade.
Back on route 93 after our visit we crossed the new bridge and headed for Arizona.

The new bridge below the dam

After leaving the Hoover dam, we stopped at Kingman for our lunch. Kingman is a town which was on the old route 66, now often referred to as the Historic Route 66. This road once ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, a stretch of over two thousand miles. It was removed from the highway system in the 1980s and has been mourned by the people of the US ever since.

It has had a song written for it, a TV show named after it and is trekked on by nostalgia seekers from all over the world. It is now a tourist attraction at Kingman and the town lays claim to being on the longest remaining stretch of the road. Leaving Kingman, the I-40 heads straight east whilst the old Route 66 loops north-east up to Peach Springs and curves south again, merging with the I-40 about one hundred miles east of Kingman. This part of the I-40 then follows the path of Route 66, that stretch having been improved to Interstate standard and renumbered, which means that we have driven along some of Historic route 66 whilst heading from Kingman to Williams.

Williams is a favourite spot for tourists to stay who are visiting The Grand Canyon and there is a railway link from this town to the Grand Canyon Village.
From Williams we headed north up the 64 which takes you to Grand Canyon Village, a distance of about 60 miles.

The scenery along the way was different with mountains covered in small bushes but little grass. The land was still dry and arid but as we approached the Grand Canyon, the trees became larger with more grass and other foliage growing beneath them.

As we approached the canyon, the trees got bigger and more frequent

The Grand Canyon is very long, stretching for over two hundred and seventy miles and we were headed for one end of this vast hole in the ground.
Arriving at the Information Centre we looked at the geological information about the creation of the canyon and the kinds of strata exposed in the canyon walls and then walked to the rim.

The model of the strata found in the canyon

Around this part of the canyon you are around seven thousand feet in altitude, so the air is a bit thin and walking up a few steps became a major challenge for someone as unfit as myself and TBH. However, we spent some time simply walking along and gazing and photographing the incomprehensibly vast ditch we were seeing and felt a growing sense of awe as the sheer size started to penetrate our numbed brains.

After getting our fill of the view, we drove along the rim and stopped at another view point further east and went through the WOW! Factor again and then again.

Walking along another viewpoint, the wind was picking up and it was beginning to get a bit late but we were still looking at the canyon as the shadows started to lengthen and the view changed from pale pastels to hard dark shadows that emphasised the ruggedness. I had been wearing a white hiker’s sun hat which I had owned for some time, it was a good sun hat and entirely necessary for someone of thinning hair whenever there is any sun, because lacking a thick thatch, I now burn easily on top. Standing near the rim, a gust of wind suddenly took off my hat and blew it into the canyon. It fell a long way down and we could see it stuck in a bush but without climbing gear there was no way to get it. So it is probably still there, a lasting token of my visit until is rots away or someone much more agile than me finds it.
Further along the rim is a tower built in the 1930s by the architect Mary Colter to provide a view across the canyon and designed to look similar to the Anasazi Pueblo architecture found in Colorado and Arizona. Anasazi towers are much smaller than this one but exist at several sites once occupied by the Anasazi people but no one sure what their purpose was. They are often referred to as watchtowers.

The Watchtower

We eventually had to leave this impressive place and head for Flagstaff, where we were booked in to a hotel for that night. Driving east towards route 89, the 64 follows the Little Colorado River which has carved a much smaller canyon, but which is still quite impressive scenery. Joining route 89, we headed south towards Flagstaff. It was starting to get late and the sun was quite low as we headed south and the sun created interesting shadows.

The Little Colorado 

We were paced by this shadow car for some miles

On our left as we approached Flagstaff, there is an extinct volcano, known as Sunset Crater. This was very appropriate because the sun was setting as we drove past and it was side lit by the low sun.

Sunset Crater near sunset

We were booked into a Howard Johnson motel and had a little difficulty finding it, discovering there were two in Flagstaff as we searched, but we finally got to the right one.
Flagstaff is not very far from the Barringer Crater, the first terrestrial meteor crater to be recognised as such and something of a turning point in geology. I would like to have visited this but unfortunately we did not have enough time.
We ate in a restaurant called The Cracker Barrel, a chain found only in the south of the USA, which are themed to be a real old time country store and you walked through a scene from a Hollywood western to get into the dining area. Cracker Barrel had the most wonderful menu we had experienced in any of the eateries we had been to so far on this trip.